The Age Of Obama

My impulse to write often seems to arise in connection with the cold.  Looking back, I've realized that a disproportionate number of these blog entries are ruminations on ice and snow.  This is puzzling to me, not that frigid winter and its corollaries aren’t a worthwhile subject, but that sometimes I feel chained to their inspirational tug. 

In thinking on this I was drawn to memories of a trip I took during the summer before my senior year in high school.  Me and three friends hitch hiked and hopped freight trains across Canada; Vancouver to Montreal.  It was an odyssey rich in subplots and adventures.  So when I serendipitiously unearthed my journal from that trip many years later, I rushed through the scrawled text breathless with expectations of an epic telling.  To my disappointment the entire journal seemed to amount to little more  than a litany of the meals we had eaten during our travels.  We had subsisted, my eighteen year old self reminded me, largely on a diet of canned foods: beans, sardines, two colors of pudding (white and brown), cans of stew and cans of soup.  From a nutritional standpoint it’s a miracle we survived.  One of my fellow travelers, in an attempt to offer support in the face of my embarrassment at having produced such an inane corpus, made the trenchant observation that my perseverance on food was entirely appropriate.  He pointed out that throughout most of that summer, food had been a constant preoccupation.  We could never be sure where we’d be the next time our stomachs called, and much of the trip was spent standing by the Trans-Canadian Highway, miles from grocery stores or restaurants.  We couldn’t afford restaurants, and besides, all of us would rather have been digging into a can of beans on a grassy on-ramp or in the open door of a rolling box car than sitting in a safe and predictable restaurant.  When I wrote in my journal at the end of a day on the road, my thoughts had apparently crystallized around each can of sardines, my yearning to be a great writer and thinker notwithstanding.  Nowadays, it seems, inspiration dawns in the face of navigating an icy sidewalk or bracing against a bitter wind as I walk to work in the morning. 

Last week I made an appointment with my car guy to heed a bothersome warning light and to get a long overdue tune up.  I had procrastinated for many more days than I should have due to the fact that, in scheduling this, I was consigning myself to being car-less.  My erratic and often late night schedule made this a less than enticing prospect, especially in light of the fact that my mechanic has relocated to East Shit Creek, three progressively more remote bus connections from where I work and live.   Add to this the fact that it’s winter and curb time takes on a special bone chilling appeal.  I know I’m a wimp to bemoan this fact, but what can I say, I’m the guy who wrote about baked beans instead of Banff.

Of course on the morning of my appointment there was a snow storm.  Undaunted I arose, looked out the window at the gathering snow, and made the decision to fully accept my plight. This was, and always is, a smart move in that it allowed me to abandon ambivalence about what needed to be done, and therefore, to be prepared.  I dressed for the coldest case scenario with my heaviest gloves and scarf.  I brought an umbrella.  

Upon arriving at the garage I had a perfunctory conversation with Rob the mechanic, who would soon have six hundred of my dollars, handed him the key, and headed out into the storm.  Stepping away from my placental Honda I felt a tug of anxiety, but also the energetic lift which comes from stepping, even slightly, off the grid of routine.  Rob had somewhat guiltily mentioned that buses didn’t run too often on this line and after about 20 minutes of stamping down snow and peering down the road looking for the #33, my enthusiasm began to fade. 

While we were crossing Canada, taking a bus anywhere smacked of giving up.  It was a last ditch option of which we never availed ourselves.  If we’d wanted to take public transportation across the continent we’d have purchased a ticket.  Adventure was the point.  Contact.  Hitch hiking put you at the mercy of which ever lunatic decided to pull over and let you into their car (and often into their thoughts as well) but it was empowering too.  Vast resources of fortune were on tap with a simple flash of one's thumb.  Of course nowadays it’s "too dangerous" to hitch hike.  Back in 1969 it was still considered safe.  Being adolescents we were not exactly reliable  judges of what was or wasn’t safe, but the fact that all of our parents had given this trip, and that mode of transportation, their blessing seemed to make it so. 

Now, as frigidity set in, the fact that I'd narrowed my options to one indeterminate bus began to feel onerous.  Certainly there were other possibilities to get from point A to point B.  People were driving cautiously because of the storm, affording me the opportunity to get a better look at them as they passed, and they at me.  I must have seemed a sympathetic character, standing there with my blue canvas bag over my shoulder and my umbrella over my head, a middle aged Mary Poppins just waiting for a gust of human kindness.  And each of them seemed to have a little Bert in them as well.  Aw hell!  I stuck out my thumb.   Its gotta be OK to hitch hike again; it’s the age of Obama.  Possibilities buried for decades under the ice and snow of stupidity and greed are peeking out from underneath snow banks everywhere.  Decorate the sidewalk and I'm all over it baby!

Call me naive, but I got a ride.